The Shawsheen Embarassment II
by Koi Lungfish
Summary: G1, preEarth - Starscream's undignified return.


**Title: The Shawsheen Embarassment II  
Author: Koi Lungfish  
Disclaimer: Based on characters and situations from The Transformers ((c) 1986 Hasbro, Ltd). Used without permission. Text (c) 2007, Koi Lung Fish (Mark of Lung. All Rights Reserved).  
Continuity: G1 cartoon, pre-Earth.**

* * *

"I can't feel my legs," Starscream said as soon as his vocal processor became functional again. 

"You don't have any legs," said a familiar voice.

Starscream started up his right optic since the left one was failing to respond. Everything was blurred - the optic crystal had been compacted, crushed into its shortest focus by intense pressure. Presuming the data from the last of his gyros was correct, he was looking up at a ceiling - a grey-purple blur, therefore a Decepticon base. Over him hung an indistinct shape in red and yellow. "Hot Glass? That's you, isn't it?"

"Yes sir!" The bright shape blurred, possibly saluting.

"Where are my legs?" Starscream asked, running through the catalogue of dysfunction in his body. His left arm wouldn't move if it was there at all and his right hand insisted it had no fingers. His wings were crushed into flat messes of alloyed pulp, hanging limp and useless from his back. Every joint was jammed with something hard and crunchy that would have kept him immobile even if his motors weren't ruined from long submersion in ocean depths.

"We think they're somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, sir," Hot Glass said, perhaps making a gesture Starscream couldn't make out. "You were bitten in half, boss, remember?"

"Of course I remember, you idiot," Starscream said. "Why am I feeling so mellow about this mess?"

"You're on a system shunt," Hot Glass said. "I had Bonesaw bring you back up that way before repairs -"

"If you think I'll beat you any less harshly for leaving me at the bottom of the ocean," Starscream snapped, trying to grab Hot Glass but only causing gears to grind in his arm, "just because you woke me up when I can't _move_ - !"

"Actually, I thought it best to, err, inform you of what Bonesaw said he'd need to do before he did it."

"Hot Glass, you're crawling," Starscream snarled, testing the focus motors around his optic and finding them all severed from the compacted crystal. "I don't like weak officers."

"Sir!" Hot Glass said with more firmness of tone. "Starscream, sir, your body is a _wreck_."

"I _had_ noticed," the Air Commander said bitterly.

"Bonesaw insists that an entirely new body is necessary, and there have been some interesting advances in cermets -"

_Advances?_ Starscream felt a tweak of anxiety. "How long have I been offline?" he asked immediately, glad for the moment that his face was crushed to paralysis, unable to show the twitching of nervous expectation.

Hot Glass flinched. "Eighteen vorns."

"_What?_ How _dare_ you leave me at the bottom of the ocean for that long?" Starscream's rage was enough to make him twitch, what was left of his body spasming. One of his wings cracked and fell off. Starscream was bleakly glad of the system shunt that prevented him from feeling the pain of his damages.

"There - there were retrieval problems -" Hot Glass stammered.

"_Obviously_," Starscream hissed, his vocaliser crackling. "Eighteen vorns worth of problems. _Explain!_"

"The Shawsheen -"

"That big fish-thing?" Starscream had a momentary memory of a huge pink-red maw filled with teeth the size of mountains as it slammed shut around his waist.

"That was one of them, yes." Hot Glass shifted around a bit, blotches of red and yellow overlapping in Starscream's vision. "The Shawsheen were a large and hostile species capable of biting through the armour of our siege submarines."

"So I presume you didn't bother trying the siege subs?" Starscream asked, wondering if he'd managed to pick a prize moron for the head of his personal guard.

"Well, we did, but not until we were short of other ideas." Hot Glass sighed. "We tried to retrieve you by stealth. We sent in specially built deep-sea salvage operatives. The Shawsheen chewed them up and dumped the pieces in a deep-sea trench. We created a fleet of kamikaze drones to protect our salvage operatives. The Shawsheen detonated the drones with long-range sonar pulses, and the explosions destroyed the salvagers. We tried blowing up some of their food-cluster city-things, but that just made them angry, so they attacked our land-base with a tidal wave. That submerged the island our base was on, and they started swimming into the base, so we had to retreat into orbit."

Starscream groaned. "How long did you waste on this foolish head-to-head-butting?"

Hot Glass made a small, pained sound. "Three or four vorns..."

"And then what?"

"We tried to boil their oceans dry using a giant solar powered laser."

There was a pause.

"_And?_" Starscream prompted savagely.

"They designed orbital-reach missile launchers," Hot Glass admitted.

"They shot down my _Spearhead_?" Starscream yelled.

"No, just the laser and the solar power station," Hot Glass said, voice thin. "After that we pulled back and built a base on one of their moons to think things over for a while. Our next plan-"

"_Who_ came up with these plans?" Starscream said, bemused at the outlandish foolishness of his guards.

"Err, well, we rather worked together on them," Hot Glass said. Starscream could hear his fingers clicking as he wrung his hands. "Myself and Bonesaw and Jetchaser -"

"_Who?_" Starscream asked, unbelieving.

"Jetchaser. Err, he's the head of the deep-sea salvage unit. He, err, gets distracted."

Starscream groaned and wondered if he should just shoot his entire guard staff. "Get on with it."

"Well, we tried causing tidal waves by changing the orbits of their moons, but that didn't really bother them as much as we'd hoped, so we then we just built a dozen really big hydrox processing stations and tried to turn their oceans into energon."

Starscream imagined a world covered in seas of energon. _A more pleasant thought than what these idiots have been up to._

"After they wrecked the generator-stations, we pulled back for another rethink and ... well, err..."

"Let me guess," Starscream sighed, giving up trying to focus his optic. "You tried making an allegiance with them against the Autobots?"

"No," Hot Glass said, sounding surprised at the idea. "They were the enemy..."

"_Idiot!_" Starscream yelled. "If they were powerful enough to hold Decepticons at bay, they were powerful enough to damage the Autobots."

"Nobody thought of that one," Hot Glass said sadly. "Besides, they knew we were out to get them and after seventeen vorns they were out to get us too."

"And what did you do to them?" Starscream asked dryly.

"Nothing," Hot Glass said.

Starscream waited silently, trying to glare Hot Glass into speech with one barely-functional optic.

"They'd been so focused on fighting us off for all those years that when we pulled back, they thought we'd retreated. Some of them wanted to build spaceships and chase us down and finish us off, and some of them wanted to throw the bombs in the bin and get back to doing whatever giant horrible fish monsters do when they're not trying to eat us."

"And then..." Starscream prompted.

"They had an all-out bombs-and-screaming civil war," Hot Glass said. "We sat on our tailfins for twenty years and watched as they turned their planet into a smelting pit."

"I'm so reassured to hear that your efforts to retrieve me were persistent," Starscream muttered.

"Well, they were throwing a lot of firepower around and we didn't want to get _The Spearhead_ wrecked. So we just waited for the booms and shouting to stop, then we flew in, dug you up and here you are."

"And the Shawsheen?"

"We're still in orbit," Hot Glass said. "Would you like to see the planet?"

"Better than looking at you," Starscream grumbled.

Hot Glass leaned closer over him, poking something that was probably a cable at him. Starscream's senses folded inside out and he saw through the sensors of _The Spearhead_, hanging in orbit above the planet of Shawsheen.

Below him, the planet smoldered, reduced to a cinderous hulk wrapped in shredded veils of black radioactive dust. The molten core of the planet glowed and spat through rifts in its savaged crust. The oceans were gone, leaving only seabeds grey with fired clay, mingled with the pale bones of a civilization that had fought against Decepticons for so long that it had sought to become them and perished for it.

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**Author's notes & addenda:  
I really didn't intend to write this sequel. Feedback always welcomed.**


End file.
